Tucker Carlson Embraces Pyramid Conspiracies and Lost Race Mound Builder Myths

​I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that after just three cobbled-together clip shows to start its new season, Ancient Aliens is already going on a break, substituting an even longer, multi-hour clip show under the Ancient Aliens Declassified brand. Anyhow, it turns out that I missed a bizarre appearance in which Tucker Carlson has some things to say about ancient history after descending further into the Ancient Aliens / Ancient Apocalypse rabbit hole. 

​In an interview a few weeks ago with Roseanne Barr that touched on the Tartaria conspiracy theory that all history is a fabrication to cover up a lost civilization of super-white proto-Russians (and, yes, everything I write nowadays sounds like an A.I.-generated Mad Lib), Carlson joined the ranks of pyramidiots: “I don’t understand how we could send men to the moon, but no one could come up with even a rough theory for how the pyramids were built, or even what age they are ’cause we don’t know that either, actually.” Echoing Graham Hancock, he then said there is “intellectual resistance” to acknowledging the mysteries of prehistory, and he embraced the racist nineteenth century Mound Builder myth—the subject of my 2020 book The Mound Builder Myth—to claim that pre-Contact earthworks were not the work of Native Americans but of some lost race.
 
Carlson alleged a conspiracy of billionaires created by Satan to hide the “truth” about ancient history, including—and I wish I were making this up—that there were “population centers” in America before 1492. He can’t believe that America had cities before European contact. (So, what does he think was going in Mexico, Central America, and South America?) Apparently, in Carlson’s mind, Native people were small groups of hunter-gatherers until white people came to teach them the ways of civilization, so therefore a lost (presumably white) race had to have been responsible for any ancient achievements.
 
That’s the essence of the Mound Builder myth, proposed by European colonists to dispossess Native people and regularly debunked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But thanks to Carlson’s embrace of UFO conspiracies, he moved straight to ancient astronaut conspiracies and then to the Victorian imperialist fantasies that inspired them. It’s as classic a proof of my longstanding thesis on the dangers of ancient astronaut theories as a vector for reinfecting audiences with racist and colonialist Victorian pseudoscience as you will likely find.